“You know the answer to that.”
They boarded the helicopter and joined the procession.
CHAPTER 27
Khasan Basayev entered the MLQM warehouse through the chain-link fence on the private side, not the military side, of the compound. He used bolt cutters to chop away the rudimentary lock, opened the gate, and then carried the unconscious young girl through the opening.
Time was of the essence. He cradled her in his arms and walked into the warehouse, which was behind the hangar housing the two airplanes. Basayev had been waiting in the woods a hundred meters away. After the burning helicopter limped back to the airfield, Basayev walked through the maze of military transfer cases until he found the right one.
When he had previously planted the device, he had noticed that the container had small ovals of black spray paint on either side. He opened the case and saw that the car battery and the device were still there. Everything looked good.
He laid the girl inside the case and closed the lid. Harwood had turned out to be a decent adversary and a worthwhile rabbit for the FBI to chase. From the beginning, this was all about the big payday. The one hundred thousand dollars he had placed in the Reaper’s bank account after each of the kills was probably unnecessary, but still a worthwhile precaution. He looked down at the girl and then at the other cases strewn about the floor. He thought of Nina being in this very case and the other ghost girls that were transported from Afghanistan and Iraq to service their new masters. He felt nothing for the girl that lay before him next to the car battery, just as he felt nothing for the women who had been abducted, other than Nina. In fact, he was grateful to them for providing him with a portal and the basis for an elaborate plan.
He fixed a timer to the metal briefcase near Monisha’s head and pressed a button to begin the countdown. Next, Basayev closed the lid on what would become Monisha’s coffin. He didn’t care what the military called the caskets, they were coffins. They carried and contained death.
He retraced his steps as he heard the large corrugated metal door lifting, tugged by a chain pulley system. Quietly he filed through the caskets, out the door, and through the gate. He fumbled with the lock so that it looked shut, but a close inspection would reveal that it wasn’t.
He drove his Hummer to the Isle of Hope Marina, where he had moored the Marquis 690 yacht that he had chartered from the Bahamas. He parked in a remote portion of the lot and wiped down the Hummer, removing all fingerprints and DNA. He wasn’t sure that there hadn’t been some radioactive leakage in the back during the short period of time he had the weapon in the rear compartment, but there was very little he cared to do about that.
He was nearly free.
He walked to the end of the pier, noticing the many other yachts lining the docks. He saw the Breeze Machine and stepped onto its swim platform, climbed the rail, and stood in the open deck, absorbing the night.
Time to pick up Nina; she had finally contacted him.
* * *
Ramsey Xanadu stood inside MLQM’s dark hangar adjacent to Hunter Army Airfield. The MLQM Boeing 737 cargo jet and General Markham’s 737 luxury jet were in front of him. The open hangar doors beyond the airplanes gave way to a misty darkness filled with drifting fog and stale air. The cargo 737 had its rear ramp resting on the concrete, like an open jaw on a nutcracker.
Markham will crack my nuts if I don’t solve this bullshit, Xanadu thought.
He turned in the dim light and stared at the line of twenty women standing in the dark. Markham’s executive helicopter had just delivered the last batch of girls from the Tybee Island compound. Now he could fully implement the plan he had briefed to Markham.
Because he had found the bomb, he had decided to prepare these women for movement overseas. He preferred to sell the women in Syria to ISIS, as he had done in the past. Like a pig farmer, Xanadu wasted no part of the product. The women had provided a valuable service to the MLQM and CLEVER employees and members and now it would normally be time to cycle them to ISIS for sale. But because of the bomb and the Reaper activity, he had a different plan.
He walked down the line of women, who were standing with their hands clasped in front of them in the fig-leaf pose, eyes cast downward at the concrete floor, their humiliation having taken permanent hold. They were dressed in a variety of Western garb: dresses, skirts, blouses. To the average onlooker they could have been Middle Eastern high school students on a field trip to Hunter Army Airfield—save the ankle chains binding them together.
Of course, they were captives and sex slaves, not high school students, or anything remotely close to what they should have been: young, eager women ready to challenge the world. Xanadu knew that each of them was broken in her own way. He’d already had four suicides over the last six months. But still, they looked good. Young and innocent, though he knew they were anything but that. These girls were maybe seventeen years old. He had personally captured them within the last month. They were the best of the remaining lot.
He chose five women using the criteria of youngest, prettiest, and newest. Furrowed brows, wide eyes, and sobs reflected the fear and confusion of the sex slaves.
He lined up his five picks and led them onto General Markham’s Boeing 737, upfit with separate bedrooms and showers for long-distance trips. The double beds were covered in white down comforters and Egyptian cotton sheets, with bulbous pillows resting against the mahogany headboards. He ushered one woman to each of the bedrooms and locked the door from the outside.
Xanadu envied the plush carpeting and presidential office flush with state-of-the-art telecommunications for business travel around the world.
Once he had secured the women in the airplane, he walked down the steps of the aircraft and radioed the crew, two pilots and a steward, telling them that General Markham, two congressmen, and two CLEVER CEOs—one a pharmaceutical company chief executive and the other the leader of a major defense contractor—were about to arrive and would be ready for departure in thirty minutes. The helicopter would return after making the final trip from Tybee Island with Markham and his investors.
He then led the remaining fifteen women across the hangar floor, up the tongue of the cargo ramp. They followed Xanadu in single file into the MLQM Boeing 737, which was kitted out as a cargo airplane. In it, he had previously had the MLQM forklift drivers load sixteen transfer cases. The women were shaking, mouths open in silent screams, clutching one another as they feared returning to their coffins. Every one of them had endured the coffin and several appeared to have decided they couldn’t go back. The first girl whose ankle chain he unlocked started to run. Xanadu drew his silenced pistol and shot her in the back, to the horror of the remaining fourteen. The dead girl tumbled down the ramp onto the hangar floor.
“You’re getting in either dead or alive,” Xanadu said. “Doesn’t much matter to me.”
“We will be okay? Where are we going?” one of the young girls sobbed.
“Of course you’ll be okay. You’re going home. We must transport you this way. Just drink the water and eat the food and you’ll be fine.”
He escorted the women one at a time to the coffins. He’d lift the lid and from there they knew the drill. Step in, don’t make a fuss, and lie down like you’re sleeping. A couple asked where the food and water was and Xanadu told them that the pallet was late but he would make sure they all got ample supplies before takeoff.
The transfer case containing the bomb was loaded all the way to the front of the aircraft. It would be the last dumped in the ocean and therefore the farthest away from Savannah and MLQM headquarters just in case it was something worse than what he considered it to be. Xanadu believed it was simply an inert bluff, but he wasn’t taking a chance.
He had told the pilots that all the cases needed to be dumped out of the airplane once it was one hundred miles over the Atlantic. He explained that the cases were empty and the military had asked that they be disposed of at sea, that the DNA that remained inside was impossibl
e to remove and would conflict with future transports.
Xanadu looked at it like a burial at sea. The pilots would reach ten thousand feet above sea level and slow to 160 knots. Then the loadmaster would lower the ramp so that it dipped slightly down and he would walk to each transfer case and remove a metal snap hook. The snap hook secured the container to the aircraft floor by a short nylon strap. This device served as a stop along the roller rails that would feed the cases into the ocean once the loadmaster gave the word to the pilots that the ramp was prepared for drop operations. As far as the transfer cases went, the perforations for oxygen flow would cause the containers to rapidly fill with water and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Problem solved. No eyewitnesses. No bomb.
All he needed now was the crew. He had already radioed them, purposefully summoning the crew of Markham’s jet for a thirty-minute-later takeoff. The plane was ready. He had personally filed the flight plan to Kuwait, where it would conduct the normal refuel for its leg into Kandahar to continue MLQM operations. Normally he would go on this resupply route, but he figured he would skip this one.
A set of headlights cut across the fence line and it was the Suburban carrying the crew for the cargo plane: two pilots and a loadmaster.
Xanadu had a brief conversation with the cargo plane’s pilots as the loadmaster inspected the tie-downs on the coffins. He walked to the aircraft ramp and stood on the concrete floor as the loadmaster donned his crewman’s helmet and parachute before shooting Xanadu a Nomex-gloved thumbs-up.
Xanadu returned the gesture, feeling a huge weight begin to lift from his shoulders.
Then, the world crashed down upon him as the FBI helicopter skidded to a hard landing in front of Markham’s jet.
CHAPTER 28
Harwood jumped off the helicopter and ran toward Ramsey Xanadu, who drew his pistol and fired.
The shot was wide, and pinged off the FBI helicopter.
On the helicopter flight into Hunter Army Airfield, Harwood saw a Hummer that fit the description provided by Jackie. It was driving rapidly away from the hangar. Based upon that observation, Harwood knew that the Chechen had not lived up to his promise to take care of Monisha, most likely dumping her in the middle of whatever was happening at MLQM.
Like the linebacker that he used to be, he tackled Xanadu—not a small man—with full force and effect. Xanadu’s head slapped against the concrete as Harwood retrieved his knife with one hand and used the other to block Xanadu’s shooting hand. He locked his left elbow out, used his vise grip around Xanadu’s wrist, and then held the knife against Xanadu’s throat as he pinned the man with his body weight.
“Where’s the girl?” Harwood asked through clenched teeth.
“Fuck you, Harwood.”
Harwood stabbed the knife into the side of Xanadu’s throat, and the carotid artery sprayed like a broken fire hydrant. He looked over his shoulder and saw the cargo-plane jet turbines turning and a loadmaster standing in the cargo bay, back toward him, pressing a button to raise the ramp. Beyond the loadmaster, he saw transfer cases.
In the transfer cases, he imagined, there might be women, or even Monisha. He instantly sprang from Xanadu’s lifeless body and ran toward the now-moving airplane. It was taxiing from the hangar onto the apron under its own power, blowing hot jet wash against his face. The ramp was at a forty-five-degree angle and if he didn’t reach it soon, he would forever miss the chance to see what was inside the transfer cases.
The plane was fully onto the tarmac now, Bronson yelling at him to stop, the ramp slowly inching up; he was ten meters away when he put one final burst of energy into his stride and closed on the airplane. He leapt up and grasped the ramp with two hands, performed a pull-up, kicked one leg over the lip, and rolled through a narrowing three-foot gap of the still-closing ramp door.
He fell to the bottom of the cargo-bay floor, smacking against the same ribs the Chechen had injured with his steel-toed boot. He looked up at the space-age face shield of the loadmaster, who was most likely wondering what the hell he was doing. Wasting no time, Harwood sprang to his feet and planted a kick in the solar plexus of the loadmaster. He didn’t know if the man was friend or foe, but he didn’t have time to find out. Grabbing two twenty-foot-long yellow parachute static lines balled up in the corner, he tied the loadmaster’s hands and legs securely, then hooked each of the snap hooks into an anchor point on the rib of the aircraft. The loadmaster was immobilized. Harwood slapped the button that controlled the ramp.
The ramp began to lower as he retrieved his Maglite from his pocket. He had left his rucksack with Bronson on the FBI helicopter, but brought along his phone, knife, Maglite, and pistol as he had charged after Xanadu.
The plane powered up to full throttle and the brakes were off. Harwood opened the first transfer case and saw a young lady lying on her back. She had black hair and almond eyes that shone in the dim glow of the cargo-cabin lights. She was alive. The transfer case was secured on a bed of roller conveyors and fastened on each side by a snap hook and two-inch-wide nylon strap.
He felt the airplane picking up speed. They bumped along the runway. The ramp was halfway down. The engines whined as they spun at full throttle. He looked behind him. Saw at least ten to fifteen other containers. He didn’t know where the plane was headed, but there was no food or water in the transfer case he saw.
He thought about his parachute training and the different ways Rangers could receive supplies. One method was to drop supply bundles from an aircraft in flight at one thousand to ten thousand feet. But these transfer cases didn’t have parachutes on them. Another method was called LAPES. Low-altitude parachute-extraction system. The air force had pretty much quit doing it because the technique was risky. The aircraft would fly low, like doing a touch-and-go, and a loadmaster would release a pilot parachute that would catch wind out of the rear of the aircraft and then deploy a personnel or cargo parachute. The tank or artillery piece or whatever was being “LAPESed” would roll off the exact same type of conveyor rollers, over the ramp and onto the dirt airfield, and skid along with the parachute slowing its momentum. It was a heavily used practice in Vietnam. After a crash during a demonstration at Fort Bragg twenty years ago, the air force quickly winnowed that technique out of its resupply options.
But Harwood had no choice and he had no parachutes. With the ramp below the lip of the cargo deck, Harwood locked the transfer case he’d just opened, then cut the two straps, and the transfer case shot out of the back of the aircraft onto the runway, creating a fireworks show looking like sparklers lit up around the case.
But it worked.
He quickly moved to the other cases and began cutting and nudging them while the aircraft was still on the runway bouncing and gaining speed. The pilots were probably wondering why the ramp was still open but they were at the point of no return. To throttle down now would probably put them into a fence or river somewhere. That wouldn’t look good on their records. Better to take off with a crazy loadmaster jacking with the ramp than to power down mid-takeoff and wreck.
More straps. More cases. Each most likely filled with a young woman. Was Monisha on board? Had he already cut her free? Ten cases. Now eleven. Two more swipes of his knife and he was at twelve. The front wheels of the aircraft were off the runway. Thirteen cases. He felt that smooth glide indicating that the rear wheels were off the ground. Fourteen cases.
The airplane shot up. He was all the way at the bulkhead of the cockpit. One remaining container. He looked back and saw the runway getting smaller. Transfer cases were littered along the concrete, each aimed in a different direction, as if someone had dumped a tub of children’s building blocks. He hoped they had all lived, but he knew he couldn’t cut the last transfer case free. The occupant would die. They were probably five hundred feet off the ground and climbing. He looked up at the cockpit, thinking.
This plane was unlike a civilian airliner. It was as if he were in the baggage compartment below, but there were no
seats above. There was a ladder to the cockpit. He considered climbing up, but since he was now airborne with the last transfer case, he decided to look inside.
He unlatched the hasps, lifted the top, and saw Monisha’s limp form lying in about two-thirds of the casket. She was in the fetal position, wearing the same bloodstained clothes from yesterday. A metal briefcase and a battery occupied the rest of the case. There was a timer on the briefcase with red numbers counting down. Less than five minutes before something happened. Was it the RA-115 Russian nuke that Basayev had jumped into America in 2010 with three comrades? Best case, it was an improvised explosive device that would blow up the airplane in less than four minutes and counting.
He looked at the runway through the yawning cargo ramp of the airplane. Monisha stirred in the transfer case below him. He eyed the loadmaster’s parachute, a clear sign these transfer cases were going to be dumped somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
“Reaper,” Monisha whispered. “Either that’s you or you look a lot like Jesus.”
“It’s me, Monisha. Hold tight. I gotta figure something out.”
Her eyes dimmed. She was weak and needed fluids.
“Okay, Reaper.”
“I’m going to shut the case so you don’t roll or bounce out.”
“Okay, Reaper,” she said dreamily. Maybe Basayev had given her morphine?
The plane banked to the right and pushed for more altitude. He let the momentum of the turn carry him to the starboard side of the fuselage. He used a series of ribs and web seats to secure his passage to the aft end of the aircraft where he had tied up the loadmaster. After removing the loadmaster’s helmet, he slapped his pistol against the man’s head, knocking him unconscious. Harwood untied the man, reversing the loops and knots. Freed him up so that he could slip the parachute off the loadmaster and put it on himself. He stepped into the harness and tightened the leg and shoulder straps. Snapped the chest strap. Flexed and then tightened again. He looked around for a reserve. He didn’t see one. The plane banked again and he could see ocean beneath him. The fading lights of Tybee Island were visible below him. They were probably approaching ten thousand feet, the altitude where they would need oxygen or to pressurize the cargo compartment. He saw the yellow static lines and retrieved three, thinking they would be useful.
Ghost Target Page 25
